Essay for the Ordinary - Cool Cats

End of The Trail Records

October 7, 2008, 07:23 PM

If they get a good video, you may see Essay for the Ordinary on some small-time music channel. Scuzz or something. Maybe even on Kerrang. But it will be on one of those shows that I will invariably abandon the music channels for and see if Dave is showing QI in the hope that I can recover the few IQ points I have just lost by accidentally exposing my ears to the angst less attempts of adherence to punk in its suffixed position to pop or ska. Here is a ska-punk band at its most ordinary.

I find that the brass section in a ska-punk band are usually the more accomplished musicians, even when they’re still not that good. Essay for the Ordinary maintain this form, and the horns are good. The guitar sounds lifeless, playing dull and predictable and yet still more dull ideas; the drums are timid and the timing is loose; everything else is just poor. And the vocals? Still holding firm to what you would expect from an English ska-punk band, is delivered in a Californian accent and does that not just infuriate you?

There is undoubtedly an audience for this, but it seems too much to expect that it can be executed particularly well. Pop-punk seems to do slightly better than ska-punk but apart from a rare, fleeting, masochistic ‘guilty-pleasure’ indulgence to this style I cannot see why ska-punk is ever seen outside of its own cliquey live scene. As a live entity it can satisfy the band playing and the few friends they have brought along, and even any unsuspecting passers-by. In that setting you can go along with the energy, miss the terrible lyrical contents and clichéd themes, and enjoy a moment of regression to your seventeen year-old self. If you are reading this and you are seventeen; by all means go and see them live, they should be fun, but do not buy a recording, you may accidentally hear it again and wonder what you could have bought instead. A coat-hanger, perhaps.

So that is all the boxes checked, by my count: it’s a pretty good ska-punk song. Which I hope never again to hear.